Simon Metz - Engagement Director

Among the elements on your site(s) that you must address, beside the usual PageRank, relevant Meta Data, keyword density, and proper coding conventions, are length of domain registration and site speed.

Domain registration is now an component of the Google algorithm. The algorithm is looking at a number of factors to gauge the legitimacy and relevancy of a site's content. As with most of the components of the Google algorithm the domain registration as a mapping of the domain registration to the relevancy and quality of a site's content.

These elements can be:

• Length of registrations, multi years are more trustworthy than one year
• Number of pages in a site, websites with only one or a few pages are likely to be less relevant or even keyword spammer/fraudulent
• Quality of the hosting company and or environment

Site speed is also under consideration as it may be reflective of the quality of a site according to Google. This is an addition to the ranking of sites that will cause a great deal of concern as small sites without dedicated servers and large bandwidth will suffer even though their content may be as good as larger sites. Google's Matt Cutts says that Google feels that "The web should be fast" and sites that are fast should be given a leg up in the rankings. Sites that are faster will lead to more productive searches and are ultimatly better for the user, Google's mantra.

Matt Cutts makes a number of suggestions to see where your site measures in speed such as the Firefox Page Speed extension and Google's own user page to help analyze site speed for site admins.